Towards the end of last year I decided to make homemade pistachio paste using this recipe from Stella Parks. Being ambitious I thought it was a good idea to double the recipe so that I would have plenty of paste to last me for a while. Little did I know that doing this would test the limits of my poor food processor. It definitely wasn't a good sign when the motor started smoking...ha! Fortunately, after a long rest the food processor recovered and I didn't have to replace it. Phew! Perhaps it was that trauma that made me procrastinate in using the pistachio paste. Several months passed and I finally found a use for it.
Pistachio is one of my favorite nut flavors and I thought it would be
delicious in a pastry cream. I found a recipe for Choux au Craquelin with Pistachio Crème Mousseline and Raspberry Jam from the blog Ana's Baking Chronicles. Her pictures of the pastries were so stunning that I was immediately enticed to make them myself.
You'll notice the crackly crust on top of the cream puffs. This is called craquelin which
is a dough made of butter, sugar, flour and salt (and a little food
coloring, if you want). It's rolled out thin, then frozen and cut into
discs using a small round cutter. The craquelin is placed on top of the
pâte à choux just before baking. When baked it turns into a crackly
shell on top of the baked puff.
One of the issues I've found with cream puffs is the pastry cream filling tends to run and not hold it's shape, especially when you try to cut into it. What I especially liked about Ana's recipe is that she fills her choux with pastry cream whipped with butter, also known as crème mousseline or German buttercream. The result was a filling bursting with pistachio flavor that also held up to piping and cutting. A layer of homemade raspberry jam at the bottom of the choux serves as a nice contrast to the nutty filling. One bite of this decadent pastry and you'll be transported back to France!
